What a Disaster

I won’t be seeing Titanic in 3-D. I have no desire to plunk down $22 or whatever to see a movie I thought was OK in an extra dimension. This experience is for fanboys and fangirls and I’m not one of them.

I don’t even remember Titanic that well as I’ve only seen it in bits and pieces since I saw it in the theater in 1998. The set design and recreation of the ship were impeccable and that alone made it worth seeing. The disaster itself was well done. I hated the script as Rose and Jack had to keep repeating “Do you trust me, Rose?” and “I trust you, Jack” 400 times a second. It could have been a better movie with a different screenwriter.

Gloria Stuart was good. Leonardo DiCaprio was fine and I love Kate Winslet in pretty much anything. I thought it was funny when she recently said “My Heart Will Go on” makes her throw up when she hears it now. She said someone always plays the song whenever she goes to a restaurant or bar and I'm sure that is very tiresome. God knows that in 1998, the sound of that Irish flute or whatever was ipecac. The song bludgeoned me to death via constant airplay that it overwhelmed any of the merits of the song, like “I Will Always Love You.”

That said, I absolutely love disaster movies. I will watch any disaster movie, no matter how implausible. We Netflixed a lot of classic movies in this genre. I loved The Poseidon Adventure, particularly for poor Shelly Winters, who has drowned in every movie we’ve seen her in. The Towering Inferno was great and a little ridiculous and kind of upsetting. I wonder if they’ve shown this on TV since 9/11, what with people falling out of a burning skyscraper and all.

I can even enjoy the stupid disaster movies. The Day After Tomorrow was laughable, particularly when they outran the waves of ice. It was so dumb that it could actually turn people away from believing in climate change. It was the same with 2012. The sight of John Cusack’s limo outrunning gaping chasms in the Earth was so ridiculous that it would make me doubt the Mayan prophecy entirely, if I already didn’t buy any of it.

But was dumb as those movies were, I still enjoyed them. There’s something about impending death on a mass scale that must speak to me.